This is my personal blog. I was Branch Secretary of Lambeth UNISON from 1992 to 2017 and a member of the National Executive Council (NEC) of UNISON, the public service union (www.unison.org.uk) from 2003 to 2017.
I am Chair of Brighton Pavilion Constituency Labour Party and of the Sussex Labour Representation Committee (LRC).
Neither the Labour Party nor UNISON is responsible for the contents of this personal blog. (Nor is my employer!)

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Tuesday, April 11, 2017

The long goodbye continues...

Today saw my penultimate
(thought it may turn out to have been antepenultimate) meeting of the
Development and Organisation (D&O) Committee of the UNISON National
Executive Council (NEC) after almost fourteen years membership of that august
body.

We did briefly discuss the
Conference business for which we had originally set the meeting – albeit there
was no need to take a view on prioritisation of Rule Amendments for debate as
only three such Amendments have made it past the Standing Orders Committee this
year (as regular readers of this blog, Sid and Doris Rule-Book-Anorak will
be aware).

The bulk of debate concerned
proposals to amend the Regulation agreed by the NEC twenty years ago which now
appears as Appendix Two to the UNISON Rule Book. I’ll blog in more detail about
this in due course (since it does have to go through the NEC as a whole before
it is “made” in accordance with Rule) but I will observe that there was a good
and full debate, leading to various amendments to the original proposals.

These are the sort of
discussions which I will miss when I am no longer a member of the NEC, much as
I already miss similar discussions at branch level now that I am no longer a
Branch Secretary. I know that some comrades are perplexed about my decision to
stand down from trade union responsibilities (not least knowing that there are
these things that I will miss).

I won’t try to make my decision
to resign “undefeated” (as it were) from both my branch and national positions
simply into some fine point of principle, since the key motivation for me is
the very positive motivation that I want to spend more time with those I love
(the success, twenty years ago, of the Lambeth trade unions in defending our
local Leave Code has won lifetimes of leisure shared by thousands of workers
over the last two decades and I want my share).

However, I have also been
influenced by the fact that there are other leaders to whom I can pass on my
responsibility. In one case this is my friend and comrade Sean Fox for whom I
shall be voting for the NEC (when I get my ballot paper…) Locally in Lambeth,
there are a number of activists who, working together, can rise to the
challenges which UNISON faces in defending our members.

It is not easy to release
one’s grip on a position in our movement, realising that this means that decisions
will in future be taken by others, with which one may not agree. It is hard to
step back to become a spectator about matters where one was previously an actor
(however marginal). It is however important to the health of our movement that
long-serving activists and officials do step back.